2 weeks Ago By Ejike Kanife
Nigeria’s minister of the interior, Mr Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo has responded to a reported breach of Nigeria’s national identity database and the selling of people’s NIN, describing it as “very debatable”. The minister said this during a Channels Television show. Recall that in June, a digital rights organisation, Paradigm Initiative broke the news that a nefarious website, AnyVerify.
com, had access to the sensitive data of Nigerians as collected by data collection agencies like the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) and was being sold for the beggarly sum of 100 naira. This information includes personal data such as the National Identity Number (NIN), Bank Verification Number (BVN), virtual NIN, Driving License, International Passport, Company details, Tax Identification Number (TIN), Permanent Voter’s Card (PVC) and Phone Numbers. All these are sold by this website to any interested party for the sum of N100.
00 (One Hundred Naira Only) for each data request. To prove their point, the digital rights organisation purchased the NIN slips of Nigeria’s minister of communication and digital economy, Dr Bosun Tijani, and the national commissioner of the Nigerian Data Protection Commission (NDPC), Dr Vincent Olatunji. See also: Data breach: NIN, BVN of Nigerians sold online for just 100 naira- Paradigm Initiative Of course, this did not go down well with millions of Nigerians who questioned the safety of their personal information in the hands of the government.
Reacting to the complaints, the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC), had denied any breach, blaming Nigerians for giving out their information to “data harvesters” who resell the same for 100 naira. Quizzed about the breach during the show, Nigeria’s minister of interior, Mr Tunji-Ojo, however, was not in a hurry to deny the breach, insisting instead, that the claim of a breach was debatable and that he would not want to go into it pending the release of an investigative report. “ If you say there was a breach, I want to say this very clearly, it is very debatable.
I know there were investigations and a lot of these investigations report cannot be for now let the security agencies take certain actions that they are supposed to take. So this is not a debate that I want to venture into ,” the minister said. He, however, assured Nigerians that their data is safe with the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC), noting that data integrity is the hallmark of whatever the commission does.
He stated that data protection is fundamental and it is the responsibility of the government to take data just as it is also the right of the people for their data to be protected. “We are not ignorant of that. We are not ignorant of our responsibility,” he said.
Minister Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo also said that about 102 million Nigerians have been captured under the NIN scheme. This, he said was the total as of the last count. He also noted that the NIMC and the Nigerian Immigration Service (NIS) are fully integrated and are working together to ensure the tracking of Nigerians through their national documents.
“I tell you this very clearly, NIMC and NIS are 100 per cent integrated. It’s just an API simple integration solution which we have done. As a matter of fact, it is one of the first things that we did because the NIMC Act gives the mandate of identity management to NIMC and NIMC is supposed to be the primary source of data.
It is just like in the UK when you talk about your NI and the US when you talk about your social security. That is what NIMC is supposed to do. And we have integrated that 100 per cent,” he said.
While these are great, Nigerians would want to be certain that their identities and NIN are duly kept safe in the hands of their government. See also: NIMC’s response has raised more questions than answers, like how did AnyVerify get Bosun Tijani’s NIN?.
